For more than a decade, scholars and writers of various stripes have been revisiting the eventssurrounding the first Arab–Israeli war of 1948, whose outcome heavily shaped subsequentMiddle East politics. Basing their work primarily on newly available Israeli, British, and Americanarchival materials, they have shed considerable light and generated much heat regarding theorigins, consequences, and degrees of responsibility for the events surrounding the birth of theState of Israel, the uprooting of two-thirds of the Palestinian Arab community, and the defeat ofneighboring Arab armies.